handicrafts & small victories

   Work finally picked up again and, in the home repair and remodeling business, when it rains it pours so i've been a little busy, but we finally got the camera.  It must be made of some kind of magic because even i can take a clear picture with it.
   My bamboo t.p. holder still isn't finished-finished, but we're using it anyways, and here it is:

nifty, n'est pas?

     I also got a little wild for pizza night the other week and made myself a pizza peel out of a scrap of birch plywood.  I tried a new kind of dough: slow fermentation.  It's the best pizza dough i've ever made and the best part is it holds up as a frozen pizza. For less than $10 we were able to make 5 pizzas (could of been 6 but i wanted one big one). We ate 3 with friends for pizza night, and the other 2 i tossed, topped and froze.  Delicious home-made frozen pizza was the result, 10 minutes on the pizza stone in the oven at 450degrees satiated my insatiable craving for convenient pizza action.  The flavor and the cost made it a winner. I'm making it again later in the week so i'll take pictures and post the recipe for my soon-to-be-famous Paper Plate Pizza.  In the meantime this picture of my pizza peel will have to tide you over.
 
In other news, me and my neighbor are the proud parents of lots of seedlings, pretty much everything we put out in his yard has sprouted.  See our baby broccoli:

we were a tad liberal with our sowing, so all the plants need thinning out.

  Last but not least, I have finally achieved hot compost!  I made a temporary compost bin a couple weeks after we moved into the house...once we had too many kitchen scraps basically. As you can kind of see from the pictures, it's 4 straw bales sitting on a 3-tiered grid of bradford pear prunings.  The branches raise it of the ground enough to allow airflow but not so much as to separate the compost from the earth, where all the beneficial microbes are already living.  The straw bales insulate (and provide airflow) so you can make hot compost without having to fill the 3feet cubed dimension that most folks say is required for the compost to heat up (which breaks down organic matter much quicker).  The result of this slap-dash composter after 2-3 weeks is amazing. I wish you could smell it...it smells like summer in the woods, with tree nymphs and everything. I guess since i can't upload olfactory hues a photo will have to do...

now that's what i call black gold.

If you can believe it, that was a pile of grass clippings, leaves, coffee grounds, eggshells and vegetable waste just a few weeks ago.  I love facilitating decompostition.